How Website Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings?

Speed is very important for a website.

Page speed is so important that, in 2010, Google made it a real ranking factor for desktop searches. In 2018, as a part of the Speed Update, the page speed ranking factor was rolled out for mobile searches too.

Although Google stated that this update would only impact slow loading pages that hamper the user experience, it was clear that websites with slow loading pages would be penalized by Google.

That’s why optimizing the speed of your website should be at the heart of your SEO strategy.

Tip: If your site does not load quickly you should consider an intervention plan that can bring it to satisfactory loading speed.

According to recent studies:

Site traffic drops after 500ms of waiting, and the number of visitors decreases if the loading time exceeds 4 seconds.
Customer satisfaction is thus reduced by 16% on average, the number of page views by 11%, and the conversion rate by 7% for each additional second when loading a page.

What Is The Loading Speed Of A Website And Its Pages?

Page speed is the time it takes to load a web page. It is determined by several factors, including the server, the file size, and the image compression on the page.

It is not the same as the speed of a website. The speed of a website is the average speed of all the pages it consists of. Some pages of a website can be slow and cause concern when the average speed of the pages of the website is good.

Page Speed can be measured in “page load time” (the time required to display the content of a specific page) or in “time to the first byte” (the time required for the browser to receive the first byte of web server information).

Note: The loading time of 2-4 seconds on a desktop computer and less than 9 seconds on a mobile device is the average benchmark.

How Does Google Measure The Speed Of Pages On A Website?

Check List Note Pad and Computer Mouse with Wheels and Google Written on Chalkboard Background

Google recommends that pages should load in less than three seconds. Also, compare the speed of your site to that of your competitors to understand how your site must be loaded to be competitive according to the criteria of your industry.

Google will measure page performance in several main ways:

When GoogleBot visits the site.
Loading time measured by the Google toolbar.
Statistics collected by Google Analytics.

What Causes Your Website To Slow Down?

Laptop Monitor display the word website with a loading color bar

The speed test reports from various online resources offer many recommendations for optimizing your website. Unfortunately, the technical jargon used is difficult to understand, which makes these recommendations difficult to implement!

Yet, comprehending what slows down your website is essential for optimizing performance and taking the right decisions. In summary, here are the 5 main causes of the slowness of a website:

Your web hosting – If the server of your web host is not correctly configured, this affects the speed of your website.
WordPress configuration – If you have a WordPress website and it does not deliver the pages correctly, this overloads your server, which results in a slowing down of your entire site, or even a total breakdown.
The weight of the pages – In general, the weight of a web page comes from images that have not been optimized for the web.
Extensions – A poorly designed extension can also notably slow down your website.
Third-party JavaScripts – Third-party JavaScripts like social sharing buttons, video player embeds, advertising iframes, A/B testing scripts, helper libraries, analytics & metrics scripts, etc. also have a huge impact on the performance of your website.

What Are The Benefits Of A Fast Loading Website?

A hand of a man holding a smartphone with a rocket going up with sky full of clouds background

A fast website offers the following benefits:

1. Internet users hate slow websites

Given the fact that information is accessible with a snap of the finger on the internet, visitors are inclined to leave/exit a website if it’s too slow to load. They’ll go to your competitor’s website where they can a quicker response. If you’re facing this situation, then, without a shadow of doubt, it’s your slow loading website that’s causing you to lose potential customers.

2. Optimization of the website’s SEO

The Google bots, that crawl and index websites, deem that an online page that takes too long to load (more than 8 seconds) is not good enough to be shown to Internet users. Therefore, optimizing your website’s speed guarantees the crawling & indexing of your pages which has a positive impact on your traffic.

3. Increased search relevancy of the web page

The behaviour of the users in taken into account by Google to understand the relevancy of a page. If a website has a slow loading speed, behavioral indicators like average time spent on the website, bounce rate and the number of pages visited will be adversely affected. This will send a signal to the search engines that your website is not is not appropriate for the search queries.

4. Enhanced performance of the website on mobile

Increasingly, internet users are using their smartphones to surf the net. With an often-reduced internet speed on mobile, designing light website pages has become crucial so as to not see your mobile traffic reduced to zilch.

How To Correctly Perform A Speed Test Of A Website?

A businessman holding a white card with a message SPEED TEST written on it

The main question is what needs to be measured? There are many measures of site speed, but only a few are essential. These basic metrics can be measured in seconds.

The loading time of the first byte of the site i.e. time to first byte (TTFB) – This is the time from the start of loading until the reception of the first data from the server. This is the essential measure for server optimization.
The beginning of the page display (start of the display, first image) – This measurement shows the first painting time i.e. the moment when the browser starts to display the page. This is important because, until this moment, the browser will only display a blank page to the user.
Loading of the main elements of the page (loading time) – This includes loading and interpreting all the resources on the page. After obtaining these characteristics, the page loading indicator finishes its work.
The complete loading of the page – This metric measures how long it takes for a page to load completely i.e. when all the main and secondary resources are loaded.

The focus should be on improving the TTFB and then the complete page load time. These two elements are key indicators of web performance.

How To Test The Speed Of Your Website With The Appropriate Tools?

Speed test word on the blue find it banner

Many SEO tools exist to help you reduce page load times to optimize website speed. They will test it on different devices and recommend ways to reduce it to get the best results.

In order to perform a speed test for a website, a specific server is used in a particular country to measure the loading time of your website. The locations of the test servers can change to perform different measurements.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool offered by Google to measure the loading speed of your page. This option allows you to see the loading performance of your page on mobile and desktop. After an analysis of a few seconds, the tool will reveal your speed score as well as all the actions to be implemented to improve your speed.

2. Test My Site by Google

Test My Site is another tool offered by Google that relates to mobile loading speed only. Simple and easy to use, this solution provides access to a complete report on the problems and advantages of a site and the visualization of its loading on mobile.

3. Uptrends

Uptrends allows you to search according to several criteria (computer/mobile, place of navigation or web browsers) and offers a cascade analysis of all the elements of a page and/or a site. The results are particularly interesting for web developers.

4. GTmetrix

Free and specially designed for beginners, GTmetrix allows you to check the loading quality of your site. You get access to a set of options, like averaging your results on Yahoo and Google Page Speed. You can also check your site from different test regions or browsers.

5. Dare Boost

Dare Boost is a particularly complete kit for checking your speed. You can access a large set of data, concerning the speed, quality and security of your site. This tool allows you to compare two different pages, which is particularly useful for positioning yourself against the competition.

6. Pingdom

Pingdom is a software recognized for its ease of use and is particularly useful to position yourself in front of the competition. It has many features that will satisfy the owners of an e-commerce site. Indeed, you will be able to carry out mock interaction tests and thus check the fluidity between different interactions (such as registration or payment flows for example).

7. Load Impact

With Load Impact, you benefit from a practical tool, allowing you to identify the performance of your site based on the number of users. In the free version, you are entitled to 50 reports per month and you also benefit from clear and detailed graphical support.

8. WebPage Test

WebPage Test is a completely free tool for testing the speed of your site. This software is accessible from IE and Chrome browsers. Easy to use, it allows you to perform a set of tests, from the simplest to the most complex. You benefit from a detailed diagnosis using a perfectly legible diagram. You can also check all the optimized pages and access certain tips to improve your load time.

How To Speed Up A Website That’s Too Slow?

It is obvious that optimizing the loading speed of your site is not necessarily easy. To help you see more clearly, here are several types of solutions to implement:

1. Use a CDN

One of the best techniques to improve the loading speed of a website is hosting your media files on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This way you can free up to 60% of your website bandwidth.

A CDN locally redistributes the content of your site, saved on several servers spread around the world. This means that rather than loading in the “traditional” way, pages are saved and then redistributed faster than with conventional loading. Also, all CDNs activate page compressions.

2. Cache your site to speed up page display

Website caching temporarily stores data on a web page to avoid systematically reloading content on each visit, thereby reducing the demand on the server. Most web hosts have quality caching solutions. If you’re using WordPress, one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce the loading speed of your page is to install a caching plugin.

3. Compress your images

Images are heavy files and they can use up a lot of server space. That’s why It is important to make sure website images are not larger than necessary, have the correct file format, and are compressed for the web.

Select the right type of image file (PNG, JPEG, GIF, etc.)
Resize images correctly to ensure that their dimensions do not exceed the breadth of your web page template.
Use online tools to compress enormous images and accelerate image loading.
Contemplate distributing your images in webp format. This format offers superior compression but is not compatible with all browsers.

4. Clean up the database of your website

A website’s database can quickly become clogged with old post data, unused plugins, unapproved comments, article drafts, revisions of saved pages, unused tags and shortcodes. That’s why its important to cleanup your database to not only improve site speed, but also to improve the efficiency of the database itself.

5. Compress your website with Gzip

Consider using gzip compression, which is responsible for compressing your content in order to reduce the data flow and therefore, gain loading speed. Gzip compresses all your files into a zip file. Then, when a user visits one of your pages, the files are unzipped by their web browser.

6. Compress your CSS and JS files

By optimizing your code (especially by removing spaces, commas and other unnecessary characters), you can significantly increase the loading speed of your page. The more code and files you have on a page, the longer it will take to load. Reducing the amount of HTML, CSS and JavaScript can speed up site loading speeds.

7. Minimize your HTTP requests

A website is made up of many elements, not always visible to the user. However, each of them requires an HTTP request, and therefore a reading, which increases the loading time of said page. Some of these elements are invisible and useless from the point of view of the user experience. So, they can be eliminated in order to reduce the number of requests as well as the loading time. To do this, inspect your web page, and carefully check each file to see if you need it or not.

8. Prioritize the content to load

Using a condition in your code, you can prioritize to only load items that have been requested by the user. For example, it is not useful to load the content of a drop-down menu on which he does not click or to load the images at the bottom of the page if he does not scroll. This is called lazy loading. To use lazy loading, simply find the plugin compatible with the interface you’re using.

9. Remove blocking resources

Some resources from a CSS library, or even data coming from Javascript, can be blocking. They must be downloaded during loading, before the display of the page, so that the latter is displayed entirely.

However, some resources can be heavy. Consequently, the resource increases the loading time of the page. If this is your case, then you will need to eliminate these resources.

Delete the resources that the page does not need for the correct display. Place the others above the fold, so as to load only those that are necessary for relation to the user experience. Resources that should only be loaded when interacting can be placed below the waterline.

10. Disable unused plugins

On content management systems like WordPress, plugins are mostly responsible for the slowdown of the site. If there are plugins that you no longer use or that are no longer essential, disable them to avoid unnecessary slowing down of the site.

Final Thoughts

Users demand websites that are fast loading. They expect a page to load fast, otherwise many will leave it.

According to SOASTA Google study report 2017, the likelihood that a user leaves a website is:

32% if the loading time is 1 to 3 seconds
90% if the loading time of the site is 3-5 seconds
106% if the loading time of the site is 5-6 seconds
123% if the loading time of the site is between 6 and 10 seconds.

It is clear that the faster the loading, the better your site and user experience will be. Analyze key indicators like bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session to identify the obstacles in creating a good user experience.